


A Beautiful Night

by Mireille



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-07
Updated: 2005-06-07
Packaged: 2019-03-10 21:30:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13510170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: "Nothing was quiet, and nothing was peaceful, and nothing was right." Wesley, between S3/4.





	A Beautiful Night

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2005 Soul Cages ficathon; my assignment was "Mad About You," and this is what I got when I listened to it several dozen times on repeat.

It could have been a beautiful night. 

The water was dark and nearly still; the ripples from Justine's dive had calmed by now, and there were no other boats around to disturb it. The moon was full, hanging round and heavy in the summer sky, and the light glanced over the gentle waves, silvery and bright. 

It could have been a perfect August night, quiet and peaceful, with a faint breeze keeping the air from being too sultry. It could have been the sort of night made for romance, for taking someone out on a boat, for heading out into open water and making love under a starry sky. 

It wasn't that sort of night at all. 

It was the sort of night when Wesley took the boat out into open water and sent Justine down to look for Angel, the sort of night when, no matter how things appeared on the surface, nothing was quiet, and nothing was peaceful, and nothing was right. 

At least, nothing in Wesley's particular part of the world. It wasn't as though he was unaware of what he was doing; despite everything she'd done, every torment she deserved to suffer because of it, Justine was a human being, and he was treating her--if he'd seen someone treating a dog that way, he'd have been disgusted. But someone had to go down into the black water to search, and this was Justine's fault, possibly even more than it was his own. 

Even when he gave up for the night and went home, there would be no equilibrium. There would be Lilah in his bed, and as enjoyable as that was, there was no way he could say that was part of the natural order of things. She was his enemy, and she had no other place in his life. 

She was Angel's enemy, he thought, suddenly, and the enemy of his enemy was his friend. Or at least, his bed-mate. And Angel was his enemy now; he'd made that perfectly clear as he'd held the pillow down over Wesley's face. What Wesley had done would never be forgiven, could never be forgiven, not in Angel's eyes, and Angel's eyes were the only ones that mattered at this point. 

Were the ones that mattered most to Wesley at any point, and Angel hated him now. No matter that he'd done the right thing, the only thing he could have done; no matter that he had done it as much for Angel as for Connor, because he'd known that if Angel had harmed Connor, they'd have lost Angel as well as the baby. 

Now Connor had grown up in Hell, and Angel was lost to him anyway, and when Wesley looked at his life over the past several months, he thought that it was possible that he'd lost more than that. More than his friends, more than… whatever Angel was to him. 

It was entirely possible that he'd lost his mind, for one thing, but if he was losing his grip on sanity, there was nothing he could do about that, and so there was no need to dwell on it. 

There was no need to dwell on any of it. There was nothing he could do about any of it, except to find Angel and pull him out of the water, and hope that Angel was either too weak or too grateful to finish the job he'd started in the hospital. And after that--

He didn't know what would happen after that. More of the same, he supposed; he'd have to work out what to do with Justine, and his nights would be his own again, but his work would continue the same as it had, and that would be what he had. His work and Lilah, he supposed, although once Angel was back at the Hyperion, he wasn't certain Lilah would still have any use for him. 

It was a pity, really, as someone like Lilah was probably the only sort of person he could be with, these days: someone who didn't need or want anything genuine or meaningful from him. He'd tried genuine and meaningful--with Virginia, certainly, and he'd have tried with Fred if she'd given him the chance. But it wouldn't have worked any more than things had worked out with Virginia. Not with Angel always there in the background--in the back of Wesley's mind, at least. 

And even before Wesley had taken Connor, that had been doomed. It was never going to go anywhere. It might be genuine, it might be sincere--it might even, a year ago, have been reciprocated, but it was never going to bring him anything but heartache. 

Well. It might be the death of him, as well, although he didn't think that was really much of an improvement.

Perhaps finding Angel wouldn't end things with Lilah, and he could go on as he had before. Perhaps he could lose himself in Lilah, and in his futile dreams of Fred--because she could have changed things, he thought; it could have all been different, and since he'd never be able to change the past, he'd never have to admit it if he'd been wrong about that. 

He'd have been doing the best he could under the circumstances, at least. He'd always done the best he could under the circumstances: here, on this boat, sending Justine down to look for a vampire she'd have staked given the chance; when he'd taken Connor; in Pylea, in Sunnydale, with the Council. In the darkness, when he'd been small--and perhaps that was one of the reasons he had to find Angel, no matter what it cost him, because he could only imagine being trapped in a small, airless space, while the hours stretched out like an eternity before him. 

The main reason, of course, was that the city needed him. Fred and Gunn couldn't hold back all the evil in Los Angeles without Angel, and neither could Wesley. Certainly not now that he was working on his own. 

And even if he had been fighting at their side, that still wouldn't be enough, and so they needed Angel. 

He needed Angel. He at least needed to be free of this need to search for Angel; Wesley would find him, return him to the hotel, and then stay well out of his way from then on. Perhaps then things would start seeming less surreal. Perhaps then he'd adjust better to the new rules of his existence; he'd always been able to adjust before, and perhaps having Angel there, the unseen anchor of his life, would let him adjust this time. 

Even if Angel wanted to kill him. Even though Angel would never forgive him for what he'd done. 

Even though Wesley didn't believe, at the heart of things, that he needed to be forgiven. He'd done what had to be done. He'd tried to save Connor, and the fact that it had all gone wrong, that it had all been based on a lie, didn't matter. He'd been doing the right thing, and if Angel wasn't able to see that--

No. It didn't matter if Angel deserved to be rescued. The city needed him. The world needed him. Besides, even if Wesley shouldn't want to show Angel any mercy, after Angel had tried to suffocate him, he couldn't abandon Angel to his fate. 

He couldn't abandon any of them, not really, which was why he was out here every night trying to find Angel for them. 

For himself, because they weren't the only ones who needed Angel. 

He shouldn't, of course, and not only because of what Angel had done to him. On the surface, his life was going better than it ever had before. Out from under the Council's thumb, out--more or less--from under his father's thumb; no more deciding whether he wanted to have electricity or food that month. No more pining away after a vampire who had either been oblivious, uninterested, or simply taking things slowly enough that no one who didn't have a vampire's lifespan would ever see how it played out; Wesley had never been able to decide just which.

On the surface. Under the surface--well. He'd had friends, just a few months ago. He'd had a family; they hadn't always got on well, but they'd looked out for one another. They'd cared about one another, and Wesley hadn't had that before coming to Los Angeles. 

It was gone now, and even if there were a way to get it back, Wesley didn't know it. This was the life he'd chosen for himself, the life his attempts to do the right thing had backed him into, and there was nothing he could do but live it. Nothing he could do but endure, as he always had. As he'd let himself hope he wouldn't have to do again. 

Justine hadn't found Angel this time, and while he wasn't surprised, he was disappointed. Still, it was a warm night, and not too late yet; there'd be time for another dive. 

Wesley would stand here on deck, and look at the water turned silver by the light from the full moon. After all, in another world, this would have been a beautiful night.

**Author's Note:**

> [me on tumblr](https://mireille719.tumblr.com)


End file.
